How Portland Does It

A city that protects its thriving, civil core

By Philip Langdon

On two visits this year I walked, rode, and interviewed people all over Portland, Oregon, trying to figure out how this courteous, well-kept city of 453,000, and especially its downtown, has become a paragon of healthy urban development at a time when most American cities find themselves mired in seemingly intractable problems.

Portland, sixty miles from the Pacific Ocean, is by no means immune to the
suburbanization that has sapped the vitality from many cities. Its suburbs now
contain about two thirds of the area's 1.4 million residents and about half of
the area's jobs. Yet as the suburbs have grown, the downtown has become more
attractive and popular than ever.

Downtown Portland has distinct edges. Its eastern border is the deep, navigable
Willamette River, lined for more than a mile by Tom McCall Waterfront Park, a
grassy, mostly level expanse suited to events that draw thousands, such as the
Rose Festival (Portland calls itself the "City of Roses"), a blues festival,
and a summer symphony series. Its western border is the steep West Hills, which
contain Washington Park, home of the International Rose Test Gardens, where
more than 400 varieties of roses are cultivated, and Forest Park, whose 4,800
acres of Douglas fir, alder, and maple constitute one of the largest nature
preserves and hiking areas in any American city.

People driving through the West Hills toward downtown used to come out of a
tunnel on the Sunset Highway—a major commuter route from the western
suburbs—and suddenly see the snowy peak of Mount Hood, fifty miles to the
east. In 1984 a Canadian developer blocked the view with a new thirty-story
downtown office building. That kind of act is anathema to Portlanders.
"Portland has an outward orientation, unlike cities back east," says Ethan
Seltzer, the director of the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, at
Portland State University. "Having a downtown skyline is less important than
being able to see Mount Hood, the flat-topped
remains of Mount Saint Helens, fifty miles to the north, and the hills to the
west." The office tower's imposition prompted the city to strengthen municipal
regulations that protect "view corridors" through the downtown. Such
regulations have become increasingly comprehensive since 1972, when the city
first required that buildings step down as they approach the Willamette. "We
want a sense of scale and proportion, and we don't want the waterfront walled
in by a row of tall buildings," says Robert Stacey, Portland's planning
director.

It is characteristic of Portland that the centerpiece of downtown is not a
building but, rather, an outdoor gathering place: Pioneer Courthouse Square, a
one-block
plaza in the center of the shopping district, seven blocks from the river. The
square, designed by the late Willard K. Martin in an architectural competition
in 1980, is much loved. Its center is carved out like an amphitheater, with
terraces of brick seating that make it a favorite site for rallies, music, and
other outdoor events.

My walks around Portland took me past Pioneer Courthouse Square beginning at
eight in the morning and as late as ten at night. Each time I went by, I saw
activity. At the end of a mild afternoon in February a group of gays and
lesbians massed in one corner, celebrating their successful defense of a
Portland ordinance protecting homosexuals from discrimination in housing and
employment, TV cameras capturing the cheers and speeches for the evening news.
(Even if Portland has been liberal to gays, this month the Oregon electorate
will vote on a proposed amendment to the state's constitution that would be the
country's most repressive to gay rights and would in effect legalize
discrimination.) On a sunny Sunday in May a rock musician named Silicone Jones
played to an audience mainly in their teens and twenties—a counterpart to the summer lunchtime concerts that entertain brown-bagging
downtown workers every Tuesday and Thursday. I always saw scatterings of
couples and small groups carrying on conversations that seemed elevated by
taking place in the heart of the city, amid old buildings of gleaming white-glazed terracotta.

Through the large windows of a cafe on the plaza's top level, customers sipping
robust Starbucks coffee can keep an eye on what's happening outside. Beneath
the cafe is that rarest of American urban necessities—clean and safe public
bathrooms, next to the glassy lobby of a public-transit-system
information office. Half submerged in another corner of the square is a travel
bookstore run by the local Powell's chain, whose flagship store is elsewhere in
downtown Portland. On a Sunday morning I watched an employee of Powell's cross
the plaza with a young retarded man in a wheelchair to make sure that he could
get into the men's room. Portlanders tend to have an almost small-town
sense of responsibility for what goes on around them. That attitude, almost as
much as the design, ensures that the square—potentially vulnerable, like
public spaces everywhere—remains civilized.

BEFORE visiting Portland, I had heard that the square is paved with 65,000 bricks imprinted with the names of people who each gave $15 to $30 to help build it, on the site of a demolished parking garage. What surprised me, in exploring Portland, is how much of the rest of the downtown is paved in brick.
Brick sidewalks in hues from orange to maroon continue for block after block.
At intersections the brickwork extends into and across the streets, as if to
admonish motorists, "Drive carefully—this city cares about pedestrians."
Portland may have the most richly surfaced downtown in the United States.

Up from grates in the sidewalks grow hundreds of trees, mature enough that when
the sun is low on the horizon, their leaves cast shade on the second and third
stories of the buildings. The trees soften the downtovvn. Another softening
influence is water, flowing constantly. Brass drinking fountains are all over
the downtown, each with a quartet of spigots that gurgle day and night. (During
last summer's drought most of the fountains were shut off.) The fountains,
donated early in the century by Simon Benson, a local philanthropist, reflect
Portland's considerate attitude toward the public's needs.

The downtown is amply supplied with parks. In 1852, seven years after founders
from New England named the city in honor of Portland, Maine, land was set aside
for the "North Park Blocks" and the "South Park Blocks"—two linear parks, cut by cross streets, that run a total of seventeen blocks. Many of the city's
cultural institutions line the South Park Blocks. The North Park Blocks are
being refurbished to encourage the conversion of nearby old warehouses into
loft apartments—one element in Portland's strategy for increasing the number
of downtown residents, currently about 9,500.

During urban renewal in the 1960s, Portland added more downtown parks, two of
them including dramatic waterfalls designed by the firm of the San Francisco
landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. The most ambitious development, initiated
by Governor Tom McCall in the early 1970s, required the removal of a riverfront
expressway, and the result was the park bearing his name. Removing the highway
reconnected the downtown to the Willamette, gave people a strong incentive to
go downtown on weekends, and stimulated downtown housing and commercial
development.

In twenty years the number of people working downtown has grown from 59,000 to
94,000. The amount of office space has increased from 5.3 million to 14 million
square feet. More than half a million square feet of retail space has been
built, including Pioneer Place, an elegant glass-roofed, four-level
shopping center developed two years ago by the Rouse Company. Stores such as
Nordstrom's and Saks Fifth Avenue have opened in the downtown, which has
acquired a reputation as the region's center for high-fashion
retailing. In all, 1,100 stores, mostly small, operate downtown—a much greater number than in other cities of Portland's size.

Portland has been able to devote its energy to burnishing its downtown and its
civic design partly because the city has not been overburdened by poverty and
racial division and their accompanying problems. Although high unemployment and
gang violence afflict some parts of the city, particularly neighborhoods in the
run-down
Albina district, on the city's north side, Portland as a whole is safer and
economically better off than many cities.

Middle-class neighborhoods have remained intact both on the flat land east of the Willamette, where most of the city's residents live, and in the West Hills,
which have been home since the 1920s to much of Portland's social and economic
leadership. "The movers and shakers can go out on their verandas and look
downtown," says Carl Abbott, a professor of urban studies and planning at
Portland State University. "It's easy to enlist those people on behalf of good
downtown planning, because they see they can benefit from it."

This may seem to suggest that Portland's accomplishments in downtown development were inevitable. The fact is, twenty years ago the city had an undistinguished downtown. In the 1960s and early 1970s Portland went through difficulties like those of other cities. The privately owned bus systems went
bankrupt. The downtown emptied out daily at five. Retailing was in decline;
stores were going out of business or considering moving to the suburbs.

One study in the early 1970s claimed that the downtown needed 10,000 more
parking spaces to reinforce its economy. Portland's leadership, however,
instead focused on making mass transit efficient and the downtown convenient
and pleasurable for people on foot. Neil Goldschmidt, Portland's mayor from
1972 to 1979 and later Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Transportation, led Portland
to develop an attractive bus mall in the core of the office district. This
speeded bus service, which was reorganized under a new three-county
transit authority known as Tri-Met.
Rather than go all out to provide parking, Portland imposed a limit on the
number of parking spaces in the downtown core and insisted that new buildings,
including parking garages, have stores or other pedestrian-attracting
uses at street level. Blank walls at ground level were banned. Even the Justice
Center, containing police headquarters, courtrooms, and jail cells, has a
delicatessen, a camera store, a hair stylist, and a sandwich shop at street
level.

A key asset for urban designers has been the decision by nineteenth-century
Portlanders to lay out the downtown in small square blocks, just 200 feet on a
side. The short blocks help make the downtown inviting to pedestrians—there
are more ways to get from one place to another, and no dull streets that go on
and on without a break. Architects like small blocks, because a single new
building can fill an entire block and be seen from every direction. In return
for the greater prominence this gives their buildings, architects are obliged
to make the buildings completely hospitable at ground level. "No building can
have a backside," says Gregory Baldwin, a partner in Zimmer Gunsul Frasca,
Portland's best-known
architectural firm. "You always put the dumpsters inside the buildings. The
trucks pull into the buildings."

During Goldschmidt's tenure as mayor, officials began planning a lightrail
system called MAX, which loops through the shopping district, passes Pioneer
Courthouse Square, crosses the Willamette, and proceeds twelve miles east to
the suburb of Gresham. Because of limited funds, the initial plans called for
MAX to travel on streets with asphalt pavement, concrete sidewalks, and no new
trees. "A number of us thought that was not appropriate," says Robert Packard,
a managing partner in Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, which designed the light-rail
facilities. "The local business community along the line stepped forward,
raised additional funds, and improved the quality." Today the entire route
through downtown is paved with cobblestonelike Belgian blocks, often
complemented by brick pavement and trees (the effect can be less charming for
women in high heels). Such comprehensive planning has enhanced the downtown's
attractiveness and boosted MAX's ridership beyond what had been forecast.
Nearly 40 percent of downtown employees travel to work on light rail or
buses—one of the highest rates of public transit use in the United States.

Portlanders' willingness to work for a common purpose has played a pivotal role
in the city's achievements. Downtown property owners contribute the largest
share of the $4 million annual budget of the Association for Portland Progress,
a thirteen-year-old
organization aimed at keeping the city center healthy. Some of the money goes
to clean the sidewalks daily and wash the faces of buildings. Sixteen
previously homeless people make up the cleaning crew, which last year erased
700 patches of graffiti, helping to maintain Portland's pristine appearance.

The Portland attitude of "we're all in this together" implies a right—and even a responsibility—to intervene when individuals threaten to tear at the
carefully woven fabric of public life. Panhandling and obvious mental illness
do not go unaddressed. Eighteen green-jacketed
Portland Guides employed by the association help tourists and watch for "street
disorder"—public behavior that makes people uncomfortable. "We try to get help for the chronically mentally ill," says Ruth E. Scott, the association's chief executive officer. "With panhandlers, we'll ask if we can get them food,
housing, or other assistance." A persistent panhandler may be discouraged by
guides who stand on both sides of him or her, doing paperwork. But there are
still street people and panhandlers in Portland's parks and squares, and
occasionally they are threatening. Also among the hundred people on the
association's payroll are twelve armed patrol officers, who do not make arrests
but who can get to the scene of trouble in an average of three minutes.

The political scientist Daniel Elazar has identified Oregon, along with Maine,
Vermont, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a few other states, as having "a moralistic
political culture," in which politics is expected to lead toward "the
betterment of the commonwealth," as opposed to more strictly individualistic
ends. Elazar traces this moralism to the Puritan legacy brought westward by
many of Oregon's settlers. When citizen responsibility and devotion to the well-being
of the community are widespread, as they are in Portland, a fine city—though a rather restrained one—can arise.

THE main challenge now is to keep the city healthy and the region manageable as metropolitan Portland undergoes a population boom. Companies from California, Japan, and elsewhere are expanding into Portland, and from 1990 to 2010 the metropolitan area's population is expected to jump by 485,000. In many places in the Sunbelt growth of such wealth-generating
magnitude would be welcomed, but not in Portland. Already people worry about
office employment dispersing to the suburbs. In 1970 the central city contained
90 percent of the region's first-class
office space; the figure is down to about 50 percent today. Current patterns of
suburban development are generating highway traffic that, if it continues to
mount; will make the downtown harder to reach and life throughout the region
less relaxed.

Portlanders have a tradition of opposing sprawl. "We don't want to be like Los
Angeles" is practically the region's motto. Recently Portlanders' consciousness
of the problems of metropolitan development has been heightened by the example
of Seattle, which once had the same motto. In the 1980s the Seattle-Tacoma
area added 466,000 residents—primarily through suburban development, which
many blame for tying up traffic and rupturing the region's comfortable scale.

Institutionally, Portland is better equipped than probably any other
metropolitan area in the country to deal with these challenges. The
Metropolitan Service District, or "Metro," brings urban and suburban interests
together in a unique popularly elected government covering parts of three
counties. Almost twenty years ago, under Tom McCall, the state began requiring
that urban areas establish "growth boundaries" to prevent productive farm and
forest land from being consumed by what the governor called the "ravenous
rampage of suburbia." (An alliterative moralist, McCall also denounced "coastal
condomania.") The Portland area's growth boundary, drawn up by Metro in 1980,
takes in 362 square miles. Inside the boundary, where much open land remains,
building is encouraged; outside the boundary, governments discourage building
through policies such as refusing to allow certain road improvements or sewer
service.

The growth boundary and other regulations have already tightened residential
development. The average size of a single-family
lot has dropped from 13,200 to 8,700 square feet. All communities in the
Portland area have been required to enact plans that allow half their new
housing to consist of apartments or other multi-family
construction—generating affordable housing while conserving land. By raising
residential density the region has obtained the capacity to build as many as
310,000 houses and apartments inside its growth boundary—nearly double the
number that could have been accommodated under previous planning and zoning.

Still, the growth boundary has not changed the basic pattern of development.
Housing, stores, and employment have developed mostly in separate zones. As
they have, people have been driving more; total miles driven in the Portland
area jumped 55 percent during the 1980s. A regional air-pollution
problem attributable to motor-vehicle
exhaust is in the making.

Potential solutions are being debated and also enacted. Many planners believe
that if a number of sizable mixed-use centers, incorporating offices, stores,
housing, and parks, are built—dense, walkable, and connected to public
transit—people will have more choices of how to get around and the region can remain compact. Construction will start next spring on a second segment of light-rail transit, a twelve-mile
line from downtown Portland to the western suburb of Beaverton. Whether and how
to organize development more densely along the current and future MAX routes is
now the subject of much talk.

The high public costs that result from a conventional, dispersed style of
development may become crucial to the unfolding debate. Many states, counties,
and municipalities can no longer afford an ever more extensive network of
roads, bridges, utilities. Tom Walsh, the general manager of Tri-Met,
estimates that it would cost $100,000 per household to build all the
infrastructure that has been proposed to continue the Portland area's current
somewhat disconnected form of development. If a more tight-knit
form of metropolitan development would cut the cost substantially and offer
quality-of-life
benefits as well, the Portland area might move toward it.

But persuasion will be required. Charles Hales, who was the governmental-affairs
director of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland before he
resigned to run for Portland city commissioner, says, "The power base of a
suburb is single-family
homeowners." These people typically want to live in homogeneous, entirely
residential neighborhoods even if they "have to drive everywhere to do
everything." Much suburban development continues to take the form of sprawling
office parks, which are at odds with the notion of a compact region.

The stakes for the downtown and the city are high. When metropolitan areas grow
in a conventional manner, the cities typically become burdened with extensive
blighted areas, sometimes including the central business district, sometimes
not. Portland officials believe that if the downtown and the city are to
thrive, 20 percent of the region's job and population growth must take place in
the city.

Portland may well depart from the American norm in metropolitan growth. The
sense of common purpose, the easy communication among the area's leaders, and
the longstanding conviction that Oregonians should conserve the good life, even
at the sacrifice of some self-interest,
point toward an outcome at variance with that in Los Angeles and most other
American cities. In his wooded office park near an interchange of the Sunset
Highway, Richard Porn, a local developer, told me that a large number of
complicated issues will have to be worked out, but concluded with a judgment
that nearly everyone in this soft, green region appears to share: "If any place
has a chance to do things differently and get it right, Portland is it."